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Me, Mental Health & Daytime Drama Doctors

2018-05-04T13:20:00+00:00

Nasreen Ahmed, Script Editor - BBC Doctors introduces the forthcoming week of mental health themed episodes.

Doctors has always been proud to tackle difficult subjects, although naturally this can be a little challenging within the remit of daytime television and the expectations of the audience in terms of what is acceptable to view during the day. But over the last couple of years we have successfully tackled child grooming, homelessness and gang culture to name a few – all done tastefully for a daytime audience. We cover a wide range of issues – both medical and non-medical through our 'story of the day’ element within each episode. Doctors strives to explore real-life scenarios that people can relate to - situations that they may come across in their own day-to-day lives, offering advice and guidance on how to reach out for help.

Talking about mental health is something we have always done well at Doctors but this is the first time we have devoted a set of six consecutive episodes to air around Mental Health Awareness Week in May. A combination of hard-hitting stories aim to reflect many aspects of mental health and the impact on sufferers and their loved ones. We touch upon a number of things such as the strain mental health call outs can put on the emergency services as well as introducing an array of characters who each have their own story to tell. In addition, there are some ongoing strands including one about a receptionist doing voluntary work at an Old People’s Home, another about a much-loved GP experiencing severe anxiety and one showing a character struggling with his mother’s dementia. There is a special outreach bus that goes out at night to assist vulnerable people on the streets. And we feature a young man in foster care who may possibly be an undiagnosed case of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

This is a subject that is very close to my own heart. I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder a few years ago giving me first-hand experience of how difficult it can be to manage the situation and the importance of reaching out for support – both personal and professional. Inspired partly by my own journey, I wanted to storyline a strong set of episodes with our regular characters at the heart of them. I was particularly invested in the many stigmas about mental health within ethnic minorities. As a Muslim and someone who grew up within the wider Asian community, I have first-hand knowledge of how difficult it can be to encourage people to open up about mental health issues and reach out for the right support. So, one of our stories is about a young Asian man who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Through this character we explore the importance of reaching out for help and encouraging others to do the same. We highlight that this man and his condition is not ‘a problem’. It is more about looking at the wider community/family and their feelings.

We certainly aren’t intending to conquer all the myths and concerns around mental health by the end of our special week but if we can use our regular characters and our ‘world’ to help viewers understand a little better and reach out for any support that is out there and needed – then we will have achieved what we set out to do. In terms of future challenging stories on Doctors – we will continue to do what we have always done and tackle subjects of interest as and when the opportunity presents itself.

Special mental health episodes of Doctors will air on BBC One at 1.45pm from the 8-15 May 2018

Nasreen Ahmed is Script Editor - BBC Doctors

Visit the Doctors website all next week to see new short films featuring the cast related to mental health:

Monday 7th May: Mental health problems by Suli Breaks (spoken word artist) performed by Ashley Rice
Tuesday 8th May: Just Because by Adam Stones (a local poet to Birmingham) performed by Ashley Rice
Wednesday 9th May: Waving not Drowning by Stevie Smith – read by Chris Walker
Thursday 10th May: An extract from Boy with a Top Knot by Sathnam Sanghera – read by Adrian Lewis Morgan
Friday 11th May: The Stress Bucket – a demonstration of how everyone can suffer from stress and breakdowns – by Sarah Moyle as Valerie
Monday 14th May It was Not Death by Emily Dickinson – read by Elisabeth Dermot Walsh
Tuesday 15th May Glitter – Laura Rollins (a poem written by an anxiety sufferer supplied through the charity Mind)

BBC One's The Moonstone - part of #LovetoRead

2016-10-27T12:45:44+00:00

Executive Producer John Yorke blogs about the journey from page to screen as a five-part drama series based on the detective novel by Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, comes to BBC One as part of the #LovetoRead season.

When I sat down with scriptwriters Rachel Flowerday and Sasha Hails to find a novel to adapt for the BBC Love to Read season, our focus was always going to be choosing a story that had really captivated us.

Not just a literary classic that deserved a new life on screen, but also a genuine page-turner that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up; an extraordinary and compulsive piece of storytelling that stays with you over the years. Rachel had read The Moonstone 20 years ago, and it was still the first idea in her mind when we started discussing potential adaptations.

Of course there’s something else very special about The Moonstone. Crime stories are a staple of fiction all over the world – it’s hard to imagine our television schedules, or bookshelves, without them. But before 1868, the English detective novel just didn’t exist. Then Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone – and an entire genre was born.

In Franklin Blake, the gentleman detective first drew breath; in Sergeant Cuff, we first saw the world-weary professional investigator; The Verinders’ Yorkshire home is the prototype for every country house mystery ever written… Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age murder mysteries, Raymond Chandler, PD James, Patricia Cornwell and TV shows from Midsomer Murders to CSI all owe their debt to Collins’ groundbreaking work.

It’s not ‘just’ a crime story, however. In parallel, The Moonstone is a powerful romance: Collins hit on the brilliant conceit of tying the fate of the missing diamond to Franklin’s quest to win the heart of Rachel Verinder, the woman he loves. It matters desperately that the diamond’s been stolen – not because it is valuable, but because the shadow of the theft hangs over the Verinder family, and destroys their trust and former happiness. And alongside the love story, The Moonstone is also an astonishingly modern commentary on Colonialism, the English class system, religion and the position of women in society.

The theft of the Moonstone – the crime that incites the novel’s action – actually happens twice; it’s stolen from our heroine, Rachel Verinder, but long before that, as the prologue relates, it was stolen by her uncle from its home in India. The diamond is a symbol of all Colonial plunder – and we’re left in no doubt that Wilkie Collins stands with the dispossessed.

So the choice of novel was the easy part… Next we faced the challenge of translating the novel’s groundbreaking epistolary form – where a series of fallible narrators write their testimony about the build-up to, and aftermath of, the theft of the priceless Moonstone – to the screen.

Rather than opt for a linear retelling of the story, we decided to reflect The Moonstone’s narrative structure by having Franklin interview the key characters. One serendipitous result of this was that it pulled some of the revelations into the present day of the novel. We see Franklin find out about some events in Rachel’s life as they happen, and react strongly to that – which makes him much more active as a hero. Hopefully our audience will be on the edge of their seats as they wait, with Franklin, to discover the fate of the Moonstone – and his heart…

We faced tricky production issues too, from grumpy horses and bouncy dogs that just didn’t want to ‘sleep’, to beach locations that had changed beyond recognition between recce and shoot, to safety issues with rising tides. The prologue to the novel takes place in India 50 years previously, but we didn’t have the substantial budget needed to recreate that set-piece location – so we came up with a creative solution to represent the story in a manner that felt true to the era and tone, using a Victorian paper theatre and a little girl telling a story that’s been handed down through the generations…

The sequence where one character retrieves a box from deep within the quicksand of the Shivering Sands was also a real test. Without giving away spoilers, the incoming tide, a narrowing beach, and loss of daylight meant our actors, and director Lisa Mulcahy, had to rise to an immense challenge… as did the writers, who rewrote the sequence to use the conditions we were now faced with on the day.

There’s much in the novel, though, where we didn’t need to change a word. Writers Rachel and Sasha found working with Collins’ amazing characterisation a gift – many of the key scenes are constructed entirely from original dialogue – and he’s a consummate storyteller.

Like Charles Dickens, Collins was writing for publication in installments, so he knew just how to hook an audience in. His mantra for writing was ‘make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait’ – and it certainly holds true for The Moonstone. Brilliant comic characterisations such as house-steward Gabriel Betteredge, and Evangelical spinster Miss Clack, are juxtaposed with heart-breaking tragedy in housemaid Rosanna’s story arc.

It’s an emotional rollercoaster with numerous twists and turns along the way – and we can’t wait to introduce a new audience to the jewel that is The Moonstone.

The Moonstone is on BBC One from Monday 31 October.

This blog originally appeared on the #LovetoRead website.

BBC Daytime: Off-peak is on form

2016-06-20T06:00:10+00:00

Dan McGolpin highlights the successes of BBC's daytime shows and introduces some new programmes for the coming months. A version of this article originally appeared in Broadcast Magazine on Friday 17 June, 2016.

There’s been a lot said about the BBC’s daytime schedule of late – the Government’s White Paper was critical, then in last week’s Daily Mail Esther Rantzen made an impassioned defence of some of the BBC’s most popular daytime shows. In a recent Broadcast article there was a suggestion that there is a ‘Daytime Battle’ going on, with BBC One said to be losing ground. I’d like to offer a BBC perspective on these discussions.

Around 50% of all viewing to BBC One and BBC Two occurs before 7pm each day so what we show in daytime and early-peak remains of real importance. Indeed with increasing trends for various forms of flexible-working and shift-working and with growing expectations around the years to be spent in retirement, you could say that daytime programming is becoming more important.

Let’s look at the data behind the recent Broadcast article, which made the suggestion that some of BBC One’s long-running daytime shows are ‘declining bankers’. Bargain Hunt came in as the 7th most watched daytime show of 2016 on all channels and Homes Under The Hammer came in at number 11. Ok, if you take any long-running series and analyse one period compared to another you can always find periods for which the numbers will go down - nothing goes up relentlessly and forever - but by any sensible measure, these are programmes that millions of viewers continue to enjoy.

The White Paper singled out both of the above shows, suggesting that their longevity in some way precludes them from being distinctive. I would argue that they are first-class examples in their genres, imitated often but bettered rarely. The secret of their success is that they inform, educate and entertain better than many other series do and that’s why they have survived for so long on the nation’s favourite channel. The Broadcast data (January to May 2016) showed that BBC One has transmitted 8 of the top 10 most watched daytime programmes so far this year and 39 of the top 50. For me, being distinctive doesn’t preclude attracting viewers but success is about more than a small shift up or down in the ratings for a series compared to its previous year.

BBC One has launched 24 brand new daytime series in the last 12 months and we have announced many more to follow those. Some of these are rich in journalism, such as Countryfile Diaries, which I have just extended to all four seasons following its pilot run this spring. Others are innovative new formats such as Money For Nothing, or intelligent quiz-shows like Think Tank and The Code.

To give one forthcoming example, in July we have a documentary series called Matron, Medicine and Me in which five well known personalities with compelling stories to tell will explore the National Health Service 70 years after the NHS Act of 1946 was signed. This is a series unlike anything I've seen elsewhere recently and which tackles a complex subject but with the kind of accessible tone that my team prides itself on.

We are the only daytime service to commission original British drama, such as Doctors which recently celebrated its 3,000th episode by winning the Best Single Episode category at the recent British Soap Awards, ahead of strong contenders from peak-time such as a live edition of Coronation Street and a helicopter crash episode in Emmerdale. In partnership with BBC Learning, we’ve just announced a brand new adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ novel, The Moonstone, which TS Elliot described as the first English–language detective novel. It will transmit in the afternoons for a week on BBC One this autumn and will be available on iPlayer for those unable to view at that time of day.

For us, it’s the mix that’s important – the range of genres and the balance between long-running series and new shows. We want to offer schedules that are consistent but which regularly surprise. Across the daytime output on BBC One and BBC Two we are making strides in reflecting the nation back at itself through the diverse casting of presenters, experts and contributors. No other daytime service offers viewers the same range, consistent quality and the same volume of original British programming each year. All of this is done within challenging programme budgets where value for money is paramount. The BBC's daytime schedules set a high standard that encourages the whole industry to focus on quality and distinctiveness outside of peak-time hours.

Dan McGolpin is Controller, BBC Daytime and Early-Peak.

Read press releases from BBC Daytime on the Media Centre Website.